An interesting point... this was never an issue with the original trilogy. There were no 'skills' to 'choose' - you got levels, and and your stats improved base on race and class. Combat was defined entirely by char stats, class, and equipped item stats. No 'skills' apart from the Class bonus, so no need to respec.
At least, respeccing was generally done by just creating new characters or a wohle new party, typically on a new playthrough :)

The micromanagement of this skill tree concept is what gets people all up in arms about being 'stuck' with a skill selection; the alternate skills are within arms' reach. No one said "I don't like my hunter, I want to make him a monk!" unless they started a new playthrough.

Just some thoughts about this instance of 'stray' from the original trilogy.

An interesting point... this was never an issue with the original trilogy. There were no 'skills' to 'choose' - you got levels, and and your stats improved base on race and class. Combat was defined entirely by char stats, class, and equipped item stats. No 'skills' apart from the Class bonus, so no need to respec.
At least, respeccing was generally done by just creating new characters or a wohle new party, typically on a new playthrough

The micromanagement of this skill tree concept is what gets people all up in arms about being 'stuck' with a skill selection; the alternate skills are within arms' reach. No one said "I don't like my hunter, I want to make him a monk!" unless they started a new playthrough.

Just some thoughts about this instance of 'stray' from the original trilogy.

Well to be fair the skills are all visible and perfectly informative in what they do, so people should read the skills before selecting them....

THAT SAID

The differences between the builds is nearly non-existant you get like 2-3 Skills per weapon type so you cant actually lock yourself in a unwinnable state i would think.

Well to be fair the skills are all visible and perfectly informative in what they do, so people should read the skills before selecting them....

THAT SAID

The differences between the builds is nearly non-existant you get like 2-3 Skills per weapon type so you cant actually lock yourself in a unwinnable state i would think.

The fact that some skills are mutually exclusive is less than clear. Reading descriptions is also not always helpful when you're new to a game and don't really know in detail how everything works. The descriptions are also incomplete, lacking stuff like durations or area of effects for some bard songs and stuff like that.

Also, I was completely annoyed when I finally got a second fighter and he was skilled just like I had skilled my first one.

"Courtesy of feedback from users such as Omelet79, we are adding a cost to resetting your characters’ skill trees. It is no longer freely available anywhere. You now pay using a mercenary token at the Review Board to do so."

Please explain why this was not implemented as specified in the Kickstarter Update.

Well to be fair the skills are all visible and perfectly informative in what they do, so people should read the skills before selecting them....

THAT SAID

The differences between the builds is nearly non-existant you get like 2-3 Skills per weapon type so you cant actually lock yourself in a unwinnable state i would think.

The fact that some skills are mutually exclusive is less than clear. Reading descriptions is also not always helpful when you're new to a game and don't really know in detail how everything works. The descriptions are also incomplete, lacking stuff like durations or area of effects for some bard songs and stuff like that.

Also, I was completely annoyed when I finally got a second fighter and he was skilled just like I had skilled my first one.

Oh right, the "dotted" lines, yeah those arent explained at all which is a problem.

1) It'd be nice to have a way to keep the pre-generated characters with their unique chatter to each other in the party, but that is largely not desirable because you didn't get to select their skills.

2) We all make mistakes when learning the game. I know I'd make adjustments to a lot of my characters now.

3) I'm roughly level 15 when I finally got a Cleric. That basically locks me out of full use of the Cleric tree. Apparently you cannot create a new Mercenary without picking all of their skills before leaving character generation, so I cannot make a better Cleric. Ugh.

4) If the problem is crafting skills, the devs need to recognize that we can make crafting characters, swap them into the party in the AG, and then swap them out after making items.

small update: seems that paranoia poison is genuinely bugged (after some patch i presume). it's not present in the mastery list even if you add it on a new character. however, i was able to do some editing on the save game files. it's far from a full respec editor, but i was able to unpack a save, make some minor changes, and repack it again. at the very least, i can reliably add free skill points to a character.

small update: seems that paranoia poison is genuinely bugged (after some patch i presume). it's not present in the mastery list even if you add it on a new character. however, i was able to do some editing on the save game files. it's far from a full respec editor, but i was able to unpack a save, make some minor changes, and repack it again. at the very least, i can reliably add free skill points to a character.

Out of curiosity, how are the save files compressed? I can't get 7zip to decompress it. I'd like to see if I can fix my most acute problems by a quick edit to a character.

Ugh, so people complained about re-spec? Then they took this out because people complained? Wow. I'm amazed. If people don't want it then don't use it! Why take it out when others needed it?
Maybe a better idea would have been putting it into easy mode and taking it out of hard mode? So many better options than just removing it all together.

Ugh, so people complained about re-spec? Then they took this out because people complained? Wow. I'm amazed. If people don't want it then don't use it! Why take it out when others needed it?
Maybe a better idea would have been putting it into easy mode and taking it out of hard mode? So many better options than just removing it all together.

No, people said they didnt want FREE respecs, so INXILE announced that in the game there would be respecs for mercenary tokens. And, as usual, they didnt follow up on their announcement, instead completely removed the option to respec unannounced, and are now blaming the backers for the removal. THAT is the story.

small update: seems that paranoia poison is genuinely bugged (after some patch i presume). it's not present in the mastery list even if you add it on a new character. however, i was able to do some editing on the save game files. it's far from a full respec editor, but i was able to unpack a save, make some minor changes, and repack it again. at the very least, i can reliably add free skill points to a character.

Out of curiosity, how are the save files compressed? I can't get 7zip to decompress it. I'd like to see if I can fix my most acute problems by a quick edit to a character.

it's a custom file format. they split it into 128k chunks and compress every chunk with zlib (it's a c++ library, which uses zip compression i think). maybe i'll make a full standalone packer/unpacker app. but my problem with paranoia poison is resolved - it's just used as a trinket now. before it was a separate ability that you could only activate if you had the poison in your trinket slot, but the way it's now of course makes more sense.

it's a custom file format. they split it into 128k chunks and compress every chunk with zlib (it's a c++ library, which uses zip compression i think). maybe i'll make a full standalone packer/unpacker app. but my problem with paranoia poison is resolved - it's just used as a trinket now. before it was a separate ability that you could only activate if you had the poison in your trinket slot, but the way it's now of course makes more sense.

it's a custom file format. they split it into 128k chunks and compress every chunk with zlib (it's a c++ library, which uses zip compression i think). maybe i'll make a full standalone packer/unpacker app. but my problem with paranoia poison is resolved - it's just used as a trinket now. before it was a separate ability that you could only activate if you had the poison in your trinket slot, but the way it's now of course makes more sense.

The lack of ability to respec (particularly with how it prevents you from making a decent cleric) along with the lack of fast travel/a decent save system etc. means that this game is getting uninstalled for me until/unless there's a game of the year edition at some point that fixes it.